Tina Campt

Professor

Bio:

Tina Campt is Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program. Campt joined the Barnard faculty in 2010, prior to which she held faculty positions at Duke University, the University of California-Santa Cruz and the Technical University of Berlin. Professor Campt’s research theorizes gendered, racial and diasporic formation in black communities in Germany, and Europe more broadly. She is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), an oral history of Black Germans in the Nazi period that examines the mutual constitution of racial and gendered formation from the Weimar Republic to the postwar period. She has edited special issues of Feminist Review, Callaloo and small axe, and together with Paul Gilroy, co-edited the volume, Der Black Atlantik (2004). Her second book monograph explores early twentieth century family photography of Black European communities. Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diasporain Europe (2012) examines the status of photographs in the process of historical interpretation. Engaging the burgeoning field of scholarship on affect, Image Matters uses affect to attend to how certain photographs move people, what the practice of making photos did for black sitters as individuals and family members, and what it allowed them to do and say about themselves. The book demonstrates how and why certain photographs ‘matter’, why they ‘register’ at multiple levels, as well as what those registers tell us about the cultural work of vernacular photography for diasporic communities. Professor Campt is the recipient of research grants and fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the American Association of University Women, The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Social Science Research Council, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.